One of the features of the Sounds of the Cultural Quarter app is that we have attempted to recreate sounds of the past as well as capturing sounds of the present. Where we haven't been able to do this ourselves we have had to seek help and this blog post is a 'thank you' to all those who have assisted us in the creation of the app. First, thank you to all the individuals who recorded sound on their mobile phones and sent them to us. Second, while other blog posts have thanked Leicester Transport Heritage Trust and Halford Shoes, these are the other organisations and companies who have been so helpful:

An interesting piece of trivia about the Cultural Quarter has been unearthed in the pages of a 1949 edition of a short-lived journal called The Leicestershire and Rutland Magazine. Post-war traffic plans for Leicester at that time envisaged a series of bus stations around the city, one of which was to have been on the site of what is now Curve Theatre.

On this map you can see the Odeon cinema (now Athena) top centre and the area occupied by Curve beneath. The current NCP car park was built on the site of Leicester's Wholesale Market, which was obviously going to be demolished in the 1949 plan along with most of the area (where is Yeoman Street or Halford Street?). We can only guess why the planners felt the need for another cinema (top left), although this was the pre-television era and the appetite for cinema was huge.

This development, had it gone ahead, would have completely erased the street plan of this part of the Cultural Quarter. However, by the time the various post-war plans made it into policy they had become the 1952 city development plan, which toned down the need for multiple bus stations in favour of three ring roads and multi-storey car parks. But that, as they say, is another story…